Cocaine-Addled

May 29, 2001

https://www.smartertimes.com/432/cocaine-addled

A dispatch from Colombia on the front-page of this morning's New York Times runs under the headline, "Europe Expands as Market for Colombian Cocaine." The second paragraph of the article says, "Estimates from the White House office of National Drug Control Policy indicate that up to 220 tons of cocaine flowed to Europe last year, as much as double the amount in 1996."

It's not clear from the article what "estimates" the Times is referring to. But the 220 ton figure appears wildly inflated and alarmist, at least to judge by the data publicly available from the White House office. That office's December 2000 "Estimate of Cocaine Availability" assessed several possible ways to estimate the world's total non-U.S., non-Latin America consumption of cocaine, and said the most consistent was 140 metric tons. Other scenarios, the report said, "provided outputs inconsistent with the other independent estimates." The report is available on the Web in pdf format at http://www.whitehousedrugpolicy.gov/drugfact/cocaine_report/cocaine_report.pdf. The conversion between metric tons to short tons means that 140 metric tons are 154 short tons, which are presumably the tons the Times is using. Still, it's a long way from 154 tons to 220 tons. Maybe the Times's phrase "up to" is intended to tell readers "we took the largest estimate rather than the most reliable and logical one, in an effort to hype this story onto the front page."

The estimates in the Times article are not only inconsistent with the White House statistics, they are also inconsistent with other estimates in the Times article. At one point, the Times says that the European Union's police agency reported seizures of 43 tons of cocaine in 1999. Several paragraphs later, the Times says that "about 50 European-bound tons of cocaine were seized in 1999." There may be some reasonable explanation for the inconsistency, involving, say, the difference between cocaine reported seized by Europeans and "European-bound" cocaine reported seized by someone else. But reporting the differing statistics without explaining the difference just has the effect of confusing readers.

The Times also reports, without further explanation, that "The United States, in comparison, received about 330 tons last year, a figure that has remained stable in recent years as consumption by casual users has fallen." It's puzzling how the overall U.S. consumption remains stable while "consumption by casual users has fallen." Has consumption by hard-core addicts increased? If so, why does the Times just tell us about the falling consumption and not the increasing consumption?

There's some spot pricing information about cocaine stuck in the last two paragraphs of the article, but without historical pricing information, it's difficult to translate those prices into information about supply or demand. All in all, the report on cocaine is a frustrating read.

Ill-Considered: A brief item in the World Briefing column in the international section of this morning's New York Times reports on speculation about a resumption of talks between Israeli and Palestinian Arab security officials. "The Americans have helped bring together security officials several times during the eight months of violence," the Times says. "Those meetings have produced no lasting change on the ground, but they are considered to be better than no such meetings at all." Are considered by whom? By the Bush administration? By the American state department? By the Israeli government? By Yasser Arafat? By the Israeli Labor Party? By Hamas? By Jews living on the West Bank? By the New York Times bureau in Jerusalem? The Times, mired in the passive voice, doesn't tell us.

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